So my Blackbook supposedly has a bad logic board. I'm about to send it off to Apple to get things fixed, but the guy said they'll replace everything and anything that has any errors, possibly including my HD.

I tried copying my HD as a whole to an external HD I have but it gave me errors. What's the best way to back everything up so I can just plug 'n play when I get it back without losing any data?

 

I'm fairly anal about data security. I have 4 750gb drives in my machine, setup in a RAID 1+0 configuration.

I use SuperDuper! to clone my data to external enclosure A.

My next line of defense are background backups via the Time Machine, pushing data to external enclosure B.

Certain core file folders are automatically synced between my machines through Dropbox - Home - Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy. for me, serving as a pseudo-backup if you will.

Finally, http://www.backblaze.com serves as a background backup for me.

Hopefully that helps! To get you started though, in your situation, use SuperDuper! to clone your drive to an external. Send it in, get it fixed up, then get setup with http://www.backblaze.com ASAP.

 

^^^ Yep, that qualifies as anal. Love it.

 

Why backblaze over Mozy, etc?

 

Mozy's interface is annoying, I experienced multiple issues with it, and to be honest, I was pretty much fed up with it. I've also found Backblaze to be much faster.

 

Kind of depends on your needs and setup. For the vast majority of people, time machine will work just fine. If you're really concerned, you can use time machine across two different volumes. Or, if you're really, really concerned, you can use time machine or a third party app to a network RAID device or server via NFS, AFP, or what have you.

I do the latter as I have the infrastructure to play with and couldn't be bothered to mess around with external drives.